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Bank Workers Tell Their Bosses: Stop Making Us Sell Shady Products To Poor People
by Alan Pyke Posted on April 9, 2015 at 9:43 am
The newest line of criticism for the banking industry is coming from within, as a group of rank-and-file banking employees prepare to demand that their employer stop ordering them to use predatory sales tactics and start treating them as a valued piece of the workforce.
A group of tellers, loan officers, and customer service representatives from the countrys largest commercial banks will rally Monday outside office towers in Minneapolis to call attention to their own low pay and to consumer-harming sales policies they say are imposed on them by management. As part of the demonstrations, workers will ask to meet with executives at Wells Fargo to deliver a petition calling for the bank to do away with high-pressure sales quotas for its customer service staff.
In a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), one teller says she has to practically chase customers out of the door hawking unwanted credit and debit card accounts' or face reproach from her manager, despite corporate policy that ostensibly prohibits disingenuous or high-pressure tales tactics.
What they want, what they need, isnt important to us. Selling them a product is, a call-center worker at another bank said, summarizing the approach her managers take toward customers.
The CPD report details how the largest banks exacerbate inequality on the macro level and prey upon trusting customers on the micro-level. It argues that the largest American consumer banks are contributing to economic inequality and mining huge profits while freezing tens of millions of un-banked Americans out of basic financial services.
The kinds of basic banking products that are essential to working people trying to save for their retirement or their children are what industry insiders consider low-value or low-margin services, CPD notes, and are not currently a priority for the big banks. Instead, banks have put tellers and call center employees under ever more pressure to sell people credit cards and additional bank accounts regardless of whether those products suit the customers real needs. At one bank, customer service staff must make 40 percent of the sales of the top seller to avoid being written up.
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http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/04/09/3644834/the-call-is-coming-from-inside-the-bank/
BrotherIvan
(9,126 posts)So now we not only don't charge corps any taxes, we subsidize their low pay and bail them out when they fuck up.
Those profits are massive, as the CPD report notes. For every dollar in revenue that the 10 largest consumer banks in America bring in, they manage to keep 20 cents as pure profit after paying workers, overhead, and taxes. That large profit margin leaves plenty of room to pay workers enough to avoid poverty.